In sport, we often hear that a team are not as good on the pitch as they look on paper. For sports writers it's the other way round: a piece rarely looks as good on paper as it does on the pitch. This piece might be the exception, in that it looks awful on the pitch as well. Defending the career of Martin McCague, the spiritual predecessor to Darren Pattinson, makes devil's advocacy seem like the dream job.

For one reason or another, McCague has become one of the bigger joke figures in English cricket history. In the 1990s, England gave debuts to 28 players who would not play even five Tests (the full list is at the bottom of this article, and if you get them all without looking you seriously need to look a mirror up and down at the earliest possible convenience). Yet of all those, none are viewed with the same contemptuous mirth as McCague – the Plan 9 From Outer Space of cricketers, only without the cult bit. One respected website, in a feature about 10 ways to improve Test cricket, suggested that: "Test captains can play a joker card at any time when their team is batting, meaning that they get Martin McCague bowling at them for five overs, both ends."

McCague's Test record (three Tests, six wickets at a cost of 65 runs apiece) is clearly mediocre, but he is barely alone in that. Others from that 90s group who were even further out of their depth, such as Gavin Hamilton, Min Patel, Aftab Habib and Richard Blakey, were allowed to slide peacefully into anonymity. What makes McCague different? There's his Australian upbringing, although this is barely relevant in view of what has gone before and since, his perceived lack of fibre (he pulled up lame in two of his three Tests), his fuller figure, but most of all the fact that, like Pattinson, he was picked ahead of a hugely popular English workhorse who was controversially perceived by the selectors to have lost his nip.

McCague was never really forgiven for the heinous crime of being selected instead of Angus Fraser for the 1994-95 Ashes tour; he was like a corpulent punishment to the sensibilities of all cricket lovers. As a consequence all that went before was forgotten, most notably a quite outstanding Test debut against the same opponents 18 months earlier.

It is worth recalling the appalling mess English cricket was in before the Trent Bridge Test of 1993. They had lost seven Tests in a row, their worst run for 42 years. In those seven Tests they had used 23 players. Of the XI for the Nottingham Test, seven players had seven caps between them. In short, they were giving showers a good name. Australia, after a sticky start against Peter Such on a soft, underprepared Old Trafford wicket, had piled up 812 runs for the loss of their previous four wickets. The top six – Mark Taylor, Michael Slater, David Boon, Mark Waugh, Allan Border, Steve Waugh – was, with the exception of the ingenuous and irrepressible Slater, grizzled, gnarled and merciless, chewing gum and munching English bowlers with dead eyes and expressionless phizogs. They were baggy green mafiosi.

Yet McCague, famously described as "the rat who joined the sinking ship" by the Sydney's Daily Telegraph-Mirror when he made his debut, fronted them up and lived to tell a charming tale. The match is justly remembered for Graham Thorpe's wonderfully serene debut century in the second innings, but the tide was first turned by McCague. His first-innings figures of four for 121 on the flattest of decks don't begin to do him justice, and he single-handedly penetrated the cotton-wool cocoon in which the Australians had been batting. McCague claimed the wickets of Taylor, Boon and Waugh as England emerged with an honourable draw. They might even have claimed their only victory in a live Ashes Test between 1986 and 1997, especially if McCague had been given the decision when he pinned Taylor plumb in front on the final morning.

In Wisden Cricket Monthly, the editor David Frith wrote: "So fired was up was he that his first overs must have ranked with the briskest of Tibby Cotter and Keith Miller at this historic venue." High praise indeed. In the same issue, an approving Bob Willis suggested that: "We will hear more of Mr McCague before this series is out." For such a lugubrious character as Willis, this almost amounted to a delirious shout from the rooftops. Make no mistake: the consensus was that England had found a serious fast-bowling prospect. And fast is the word: for those of us brought up on a diet of fast-medium, there was something thrilling about seeing the letters RF against the name of an English bowler. Local radio wasn't the only sphere in which FM stood for all that was wrong with England.

McCague was on a different frequency in the next Test; he was flogged round Headingley (28-2-115-0) as Australia piled up 653 for four, although the injury he was carrying was later diagnosed as a stress fracture of the ankle. He went on that winter's A tour, but didn't make the full team until he was recalled for the tour of Australia a year later.

Hindsight has recorded his selection as almost Pattinsonian in its eccentricity. A few points of order here. In 1994 McCague was the top English quick bowler in the first-class averages with 57 wickets @ 19.01, behind only Courtney Walsh, Curtly Ambrose and, improbably, Kim Barnett. He also averaged 13.90 in one-day cricket. His first-class haul included 15 for 147 against Derbyshire a couple of weeks before the squad was announced. In short, he was on fire.

It is sometimes forgotten that Joey Benjamin was also in that tour party. So just as many feel the Pietersen v Thorpe debate in 2005 should have been Pietersen v Bell (they're wrong, by the way: neither Pietersen nor Thorpe could have batted No4 at that stage in their careers) so the relevant 1994-95 debate should probably have been Benjamin v Fraser. Benjamin had done well on debut in the final Test of the summer, so England felt compelled to pick him. Poppycock. Contrast, as we always must, with Australia: a year later, Stuart Law made 54 not out on his Test debut. He never played again.It has also become normal to criticise Ray Illingworth's expressed desire to fight fire with fire in that Ashes series. Yet Illingworth's tactic was entirely in keeping with perceptions about Australian pitches before and since. Because the wickets are so good, and the Kookaburra ball so quick to lose its hardness, pace is an essential quality for those not called McGrath.

Even if McCague was picked ahead of Fraser, it was not an especially irrational decision at the time. Fraser had had a poor summer, taking 14 wickets at 38.64 in five Tests. And it is worth noting that, after Fraser lost a yard of pace (generally it is accepted that this happened after his serious hip injury in 1991), his average in Tests in Australia was 34.33. Remove a damp Sydney wicket that was entirely English in nature if not name and that averages rises to 47.18 (0.82 better than McCague's, if we're dealing purely in qualitative terms). Fraser was also dropped the following winter, in South Africa, for the same reasons.

Not that any of this can absolve McCague of the unmitigated shocker he had in the first Test at Brisbane. It wasn't so much X-rated as in need of formal approval from the censors. He had actually bowled very well in the warm-up games: he rolled South Australia with five for 31 on the first morning at Adelaide, and was England's best bowler in the pre-Test contest against what was basically an Australian reserve side (the top six, chillingly, comprised Matt Hayden, Greg Blewett, Justin Langer, Damien Martyn, Ricky Ponting and Stuart Law). When Devon Malcolm went down with chickenpox, not too many were perturbed about his inclusion: in the Telegraph, for example, CMJ described him as "Malcolm's potentially effective stand-in". There were no worries, mate.

As we know, he bowled utter garbage. Fast bowlers, as a matter of routine, aim for the top of off stump; McCague sincerely seemed to be aiming for leg stump a third of the way up, so errant were his line and length. He ended with figures of 19.2-4-96-2, but the two wickets were an afterthought while the tail was slogging, like a man completely blowing it with his dream date only to get some from a sexagenarian transvestite on his way home. It's safe to assume the McCague grandchildren will not be hearing about the day he had Glenn McGrath caught at mid-off.

Nonetheless, a few points need to be made. Firstly, McCague was unlucky to run into Michael Slater at his most magnificently unfettered. Secondly, he had throughout the tour received some utterly vile abuse because of his decision to play for England. It is all well and good to say that he should have let it ride, but you try it.

Thirdly, he was not the real culprit for Australia's flying start. McCague was whipped out of the attack after two anodyne new-ball overs went for 14 – shades of Pattinson again – and it was Phil DeFreitas, an experienced bowler who should have known and been capable of better, who gave the game away. McCague returned in the afternoon for a monstrously bad spell of 6-0-55-0, helping the long-since bolted horse on its merry way. To most observers McCague's nerves had simply done a number on him, yet he insists the problem was that he tried too hard. The appraisal in Mike Atherton's autobiography – that he was "totally overawed" – feels about right.

Others were less generous, particularly when McCague cried off the second innings with a stomach upset after eating oysters at an official function. Darren Gough was fiercely critical in his autobiography, but even at the time there were strong suspicions that he had bottled it: in this rag the day after the Test, David Hopps wrote that "his absence with a stomach upset during the second innings was at best convenient". Only one man knows the truth.Nobody could argue with the injury McCague picked up soon after, a stress fracture of the back, but when he flew home from the tour as a result his professional name was mud. It was safe to assume he would never play for England again – not even at 'A' level, even though he was incontrovertibly in the top 10 quick bowlers in the country. In 1996, for example, only Walsh took more first-class wickets. Indeed his overall record is very good. Among his peers, McCague's first-class bowling average of 27.10 is better than those of Fraser, DeFreitas, Malcolm and Chris Lewis. He was an integral part of the best seam attack in county cricket.

Some will say he didn't have enough in his locker – or his ticker – to succeed at the highest level, and that is probably true. Certainly he did not have the craft of Andrew Caddick or the brain and heart of Darren Gough. But for those whose memory of Trent Bridge burns as brightly as that of Brisbane, the suspicion that with a fair wind he could easily have ended up with a respectable record of, say, 43 wickets at 34.14 remains strong. Bowling against someone other than Australia would have helped.

Certainly, he was not the joker people remember him as. A balance sheet of one stunner, one stinker and an injury-ravaged struggle is not too bad. Six wickets at 65 did not do him justice. He was definitely better on the pitch than he was on paper.